No More Hunting in T Minus 3 Hours
As of midnight tonight the barbaric "hobby" of fox hunting is finally banned in England, so the news was saturated with outside broadcasts from a mix of resigned last-ever hunts and determined last-legal hunts. The resigned people have cunning alternatives involving artifical fox scent and running around in the woods for a day, which seems like it would work just as well without the scent and dogs; and the defiant people are telling the world about all of the loopholes they've found and that no amount of prison and fining will stop them hunting foxes with dogs.
What strange people. So far the best argument for hunting foxes is that it's "an age-old tradition" (the argument about keeping fox numbers under control as they are pests doesn't really work with me, when many weekends they don't actually kill any foxes), so I presume these are the same people who want to bring back public hanging, slavery, child beating, no voting for women, and other "age-old traditions" which have been recently stopped.
Most amusing were the people moaning about the changes to their lives after the ban. Future circulation of Horse and Hound is unpredicable (unless it turns into an underground hunting magazine, Foxx 'n' Hounz), shops selling hunting gear have seen a 90% drop in sales, but the most amusing (in a dark way) was the man who claimed he'd have to shoot all 90 of his hounds and he doesn't want to. I'm pretty sure there is a better solution to surplus dogs: giving away/selling them as pets maybe (assuming they don't chase and kill other animals, like domestic cats), or even selling them to people in other countries where fox hunting is practised. I hear the south of France is getting ready for a boom in fox hunting from British people, and frankly they are welcome to them.
NP: Sketches of Spain, Miles Davis
http://www.countryside-alliance.org/edu/hwdshoud.htm
What's especially sick about that is the following quote:
"When hounds reach an age where their quality of life has declined - ie they are no longer able to run and keep up with the other hounds, they are either passed on in retirement to other packs of hounds where the requirements of pace etc. may not be so rigorous or treated in exactly the same way as any responsible dog owner in the UK would treat their dog. They are put down before the animal begins to suffer and become miserable."
I wasn't aware that responsible dog owners in the UK killed their dogs as soon as they got old ....
It's about time it was law. I felt ambivalent about it at the start of the debate, but I've come to my senses!
Associating them with slavery and public hangings is just a facile device of rhetoric. Read too many Debian trolls lately? :p
Drag hunting is quite cool though. I knew a fair few people who do that but I'm not sure how they're going to deal with foxes in the countryside now.
Just seems like another nanny-state law really.
You appear to deplore the act of fox hunting (it's 'barbaric' as you say) and rightly so. However it doesn't make sense that you condone fox hunting in other countries. Is it only barbaric in the UK? What gives?
I'm sure the league against "cruel" sports would love to ban fishing but sadly fish aren't as cute.
That's one of the simplistic arguments posited - which really doesn't lend any weight to the argument. Even if it were the case that fishing was the same, you can't argue that just because something else is bad, you should be able to do what you want.
I'm not a fisherman, so I have no vested interest, nor am I making any judgement about fishing - I do differentiate hare coursing and fishing however.
William Hague even mentioned it
http://www.anti-slavery.org
William Hague even mentioned it
http://www.anti-slavery.org
(I'm not equating human rights with hunting in this reply)
